


Birthday Shots

by pocky_slash



Series: Team Shithead [6]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Birthday, Drinking Games, Established Relationship, Graduate School, Hangover, Heavy Drinking, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-16 22:40:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9292676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocky_slash/pseuds/pocky_slash
Summary: John can't remember anything after the body shots. Alex can't remember anything before the bathroom sex.(AKA Alex's birthday hangover.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> I sat down to do some work today and wrote a page and a half of dialogue so...you know, whatever. Surprise!
> 
> Happy Birthday to everyone's favorite founding fuck-up!
> 
> (If you haven't read [all of the rest of the stories in this series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/542227), this should be fairly understandable anyhow. John and Alex are in grad school. Lafayette has a habit of throwing them extravagant birthday parties.)

There's a small gap in the blinds on John and Alex's window. Just a tiny space where two of the slats are stuck together on one end. Half an inch, max.

Just enough to let a stripe of sunlight in. A single stripe of sunlight that moves slowly across the room all morning until--

"Oh jesus fuck what is that?" John lifts one hand to cover his eyes. It's difficult. His whole body feels simultaneously like it's made of rocks and on fire.

Beside him, Alex groans at the movement. "I've never been this hungover before in my life," he mumbles.

John winces at the noise. "Ssssssh." He inches himself downwards slightly until the light falls across the pillow above him. At least until it hits its next obstacle: Alex's face.

"Uuuggghhhh." Alex inches downwards too, squeezing his eyes shut as he does so. "What happened last night?"

It's marginally easier for John to talk without the sun in his eyes, as long as he tries very, very hard not to move. "You need to be more specific," he says.

"What happened after the townie bar and before we had sex in the ladies' room?" Alex asks. One of his eyes eases open just enough to watch John slowly and patiently open his own eyes.

"We had sex in the ladies' room?" John asks.

"Yeah."

"Was that before or after the body shots?"

Alex opens his other eye. "We did body shots?"

"Yup." John's head is pounding and he feels vaguely nauseous, but past!John was wise enough to take off his shirt before climbing into bed, so he doesn't feel pukey yet. "It was Molly's idea. I think she just wanted an excuse to lick that engineering girl...Maeve? Mabel? Maple?"

"Maple's not a name," Alex groans. He stretches and immediately regrets the movement. "And who the hell are you talking about? What engineering girl?"

"Some stranger." If he keeps his head tilted to the side, he can see Alex without amplifying the pounding in his head. "After the townie bar, you started inviting everyone we met on the street to the Frog by telling them it was your birthday and you wanted to dance with them."

Alex squeezes his eyes shut again. "Oh jesus."

"They kept buying us shots," John says. So many shots. _So many shots_. It's a miracle they're not in the hospital having their stomachs pumped. John hasn't drunk like this since a disastrous kegger his sophomore year of undergrad that left him passed out on the ground outside the SAE house in Cambridge in the middle of the rain.

"Did we facetime Laf?" Alex doesn't think he's ever drunk like this.

"Like, six times," John mutters. He gently rubs his face to try and rid himself of the greasy, crusty feeling on his skin, but it mostly just makes him more nauseous. "To thank him for paying for the party and to tell him how much we missed him." He winces in the middle of rubbing his face and lowers his hands. Alex squints at him in the low light of the bedroom.

"Do you have a bruise on your face?" he asks incredulously. "Did you get into a fight on my birthday?"

Between the drinking and the dancing and the sloppy making out, where would he have found the time? "No, Molly slapped me."

Alex makes himself try to parse that three times before he says, "What the hell...?"

"I grinded all up on this girl we were dancing with--" Alex raises his eyebrows. John would roll his eyes at that, but he's pretty sure it would hurt like a bitch. "Just, you know, for fun," he says. "Cause that's...what people do. And Molly was like, getting weepy that I'm gay and I had a girl to grind all up on and she's gay and she doesn't, so I told her she could slap me if it made her feel better." His memories from last night are still hazy and patchy in places, but the image of poor, sniffling Molly clinging to his shoulder is pretty clear.

"Did it?"

"I don't know," John says. The sting of her open palm is pretty clear, too. "It didn't make _me_ feel better."

John yelping, Molly looking sheepish--it's knocking something loose in Alex's head. "Wait, wait, no, I think I remember--" He squints and pushes through the fog in his mind. "I climbed up on a table to defend your honor?"

Maybe he shouldn't have bothered to push through that fog, everything he's suddenly remembering is faintly mortifying.

"Yeah," John says, "and then I explained and then you apologized and then Herc took you off the table--"

"--oh my god, and I danced all up on _James Madison_!" Alex is abruptly afraid he might puke. It's hard to tell if the desire to crawl under a rock and never come out is his hangover or his pride.

"Yeah." John manages to summon enough strength to reach over and pat Alex's shoulder consolingly. His stomach roils at the movement and his temples pound.

"Why the fuck did I do that?" Alex covers his face with both hands.

"Because you were sad that he looked like he wasn't having a good time and everyone had to have a good time on your birthday," John says dryly. "At least, that's what you shouted at him as you did it."

"Oh my god," Alex says from behind his hands.

"Dolley took a video."

"Oh my _god_."

"Herc took like, a million videos," John continues, because it's probably best that he hears about it before he checks Facebook. "He was documenting the whole party for Laf."

"And then I cornered Burr?" At least he didn't grind on Burr, thank _god_ for small mercies.

"I think so?" John says. "That's where my memory goes a little fuzzy." He can trace a pretty clear path from body shots to dancing to consoling Molly to getting slapped to Alex and Madison, but then it all blurs together into bodies and sweat and tequila and jäger and his hands all over Alex and music and lights and....

"No," Alex says slowly. Piece after piece starts to come together. "I definitely--I told him he had to have a good time, it was a rule and he said he wouldn't dance with me and--" He groans and tries to shake his head and immediately regrets it. "You were hanging off my back and you told him he should have more fun because he was so hot and it was depressing for a hot person to be so sad." Fucking John, his tendancy to be shallow as hell around guys he finds attractive is always magnified by alcohol.

"...that _sounds_ like something I would say," John says with probably less shame than he should.

"And then I told you that _you_ were hot and you said 'I know'--" Alex gives John a flat look, but he just approximates a shrug.

"What, would you rather I say, 'oh, no, you're wrong Alex, I'm a monster?'"

Any self-esteem John can scrounge up is good self-esteem as far as Alex is concerned. Plus, even though Alex was expecting John to parrot the praise back to him, he can't pretend he didn't find it frustratingly hot when John smiled slyly and murmured it into his ear. 

"Anyway," Alex continues, "I can't remember exactly what I said after that, but that's when we left to have sex in the women's restroom."

"Why the women's restroom?" John's not shocked they got off in the bathroom--it wouldn't be the first time or the worst thing that's happened in a bathroom at the Frog--but usually they stick to the men's if they can't manage to get into the gender neutral single stall.

"Because the men's was full," Alex says.

"Of course." John feels slightly better knowing that they weren't the only people who went a little off the rails last night.

"And then we came out and danced a little more and drank a little more and Maggie cut us off and made us start to drink water, then Herc drove us home after last call," Alex concludes. "I'm not sure what happened after that. You're not wearing a shirt. Did we have sex again?"

Alex is still wearing all his clothes--jeans, belt, flannel shirt. John wonders if he even bothered to take his shoes off. "No, but if I'm nauseous, constricted collars make me much more likely to actually puke. Past!John did me a solid."

Alex grunts and drops his arm over the side of the bed, trying to find his phone without moving. As soon as John figures out what he's doing, he does the same and comes back with a bottle of ibuprofen and the entire Britta pitcher from the fridge.

"Oh, sweet, past!John _really_ did me a solid!" Past!John didn't leave him a cup, but he's done grosser things than drink straight from the pitcher. He did many of them last night.

"Ugh, can you share? Past!Alex is an asshole."

John somehow manages to swallow about four ibuprofen without sitting up or spilling the entire pitcher of water on himself. He passes the pitcher and the pills to Alex and then tries to find his phone again. He manages to grab it just as Alex spills a not insignificant amount of water on his face.

"I hate everything," he says.

John feels for him--it's his birthday, after all. But Alex also poured several of those tequila shots down his throat and talked him into doing jagerbombs at one in the morning, so he doesn't feel _that_ bad.

"What time is it?" Alex asks after wiping off his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

John hits the home button on his phone, recoils at the brightness of the screen, and tries to read the time through his squinted eyes. "Just after one." He can't believe that it was already thirteen hours ago that he was sucking tequila out of Alex's navel.

"And what time do we have to be at the Washingtons' for dinner?"

"Five."

That's four hours to sober up. Alex can handle that. Alex lived through a fucking hurricane. Alex survived a fever that should have killed him, he funded his way to America, he managed to get a bachelor's degree in two years with a credit to spare. A fucking hangover isn't going to kill him.

"I can do that," he tells John. "That's fine, four hours, I just need to--need to--"

John knows what's happening the moment Alex's complexion goes vaguely green. "Babe--"

"--I need to throw up right now," Alex says in a rush and tears his way out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom.

John listens to him vomit, which almost triggers his own gag reflex, and stares mournfully up at the ceiling, regretting every single life choice that brought him here. He shifts and the stripe of sunlight from the crack in the blinds fall across his face again.

"Fuck," he says to the empty room and pulls a pillow over his head. Pills and water aside, he's starting to think he shouldn't have trusted past!John quite as much as he did. He should have known that drunk!John always thinks with his dick and past!John is never as cautious about future consequences as he should be, and together--well. It probably didn't take past!Alex all that much convincing to get him to make any of last night's bad decisions.

Alex stumbles back into the room and steps out of his jeans, then collapses back onto the bed. The bounce makes John groan.

"Happy fucking birthday," he mutters to Alex.

"Fuck off," Alex says and pulls a pillow over his head as well. 

They're quiet for a moment, the only sound in the room John's measured breaths and Alex's more labored breathing.

"It was a lot of fucking fun, though," Alex says after a moment or two.

"Yeah?"

Alex smiles despite himself. "Best birthday ever."

John smiles too. "Good." If it made Alex happy, John can't have too many regrets.

"Oh god, I'm gonna puke again!" Alex kicks John in his haste to stumble off of the bed and the entire room spins and dips and John moans.

Some regrets. He definitely still has some regrets.

**Author's Note:**

> I managed to go through 10+ years of drinking with only a very small number of hangovers. The worst hangover of my life is tangentially _Hamilton_ related. Like John, I get pukey if I'm wearing a crew-neck shirt while I'm nauseous.


End file.
